Author Archives: Paul Kim

We’re excited to announce the beta program for VaultPress, Automattic’s new service for protecting your WordPress-powered blogs and sites. Learn more about VaultPress and apply for the private beta at VaultPress.com.

The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. This is some of the most advanced technology I’ve seen interact with WordPress.

In the future, if your site is tampered with in any way, we’ll know within minutes and can take appropriate steps. The VaultPress core engine will be able to protect you against zero-day security vulnerabilities by updating your blog with hot-fixes, even while you sleep.

We built VaultPress to take the worry out of managing WordPress. We hope you’ll check out the beta and let us know what you think.

Today, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. As part of Ada Lovelace Day, we’d like to recognize the contributions of two amazing women who are part of the WordPress community, Jane Wells and Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Jane Wells is a member of the WordPress core development team, with responsibility for user interface design. She has been a tireless advocate on behalf of users since joining the WordPress.org project as a contributor in 2008. Prior to working for Automattic, Jane ran a media research/usability lab in New York and served as director of user experience strategy at Schematic. She has also led the planning for WordCamps in New York and San Francisco, and has mobilized an open source design community in the run up to the release of WordPress 3.0.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson is a designer, business owner, and writer. Her design studio, E.Webscapes, provides design and development solutions for hundreds of bloggers and web site owners around the world, while her web hosting business, Blogs About Hosting, provides knowledgeable hosting for bloggers, with an emphasis on WordPress. Lisa is also the author of two editions of WordPress for Dummies, and the newly released BuddyPress for Dummies.

Thank you Jane and Lisa for all of your contributions to the WordPress community, and happy Ada Lovelace Day to you both.

One of the biggest strengths of WordPress as a publishing platform is the depth of our community of consultants, developers, designers, and hosting providers. It can be tricky to figure out where to find pointers to awesome WordPress partners, so we’ve pulled together this mini-guide for publishers looking for help.

VIP Services: Hosting and Support
From the team that runs WordPress.com, at Automattic, we also offer VIP Services in the form of Hosting and Support. We’ve worked with more hosts than you can imagine, and in our opinion, the companies in our hosting directory represent some of the best and the brightest of the hosting world. If you’re a publisher with significant amounts of monthly traffic, VIP Hosting by WordPress.com is another option for your hosting needs. If you’d prefer to run WordPress on your own servers, but want some extra optimization, streamlining, or security help to future-proof your site for the traffic to come, you’ll want VIP Support.

CodePoetCodePoet is a shortlist of WordPress consultants brought to you by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. As the world’s largest operator of WordPress blogs (over 16 million and counting), we receive a steady stream of requests from people looking for WordPress savvy web design and software development firms. In response we’ve started CodePoet, a directory of consultants who specialize in building beautiful and efficient WordPress sites.

WordPress was one of three leaders in both rate of adoption and brand strength as measured in the 2009 Open Source Content Management System Market Share Report. The second edition of this report, authored by water&stone and CMSWire, was released today and concludes that three brands – WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal – are dominating today’s market for open source CMS. The report looks at download rates, evaluation and trial usage, and third party support to estimate adoption. Brand strength is evaluated by assessing search engine rankings, Google PageRank, mindshare, social media prominence and reputation.

We’re happy to see WordPress recognized again as a strong CMS option for publishers. The free 96-page report is available at CMSWire.